This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Found this program on our local TV channel while looking to record COSMOS. It's Neal deGrasse Tyson taking questions from the audience. The guy on the left is the Cosmologist my son is taking astrology classes from. Found the clip on you tube. Neal is very funny. Skip to 15:30 where Neal starts talking.

The doode is just straight-on kick-ass! Like Will.i.am is doing for science, technology and (more specifically) robotics (teamed-up with Dean Kamen), this guy make science cool. And that's key to getting some of our brightest minds into those areas..

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You ever notice how on stop lights, green means go, but on a banana it's the opposite? Yellow means "go ahead." Green means "slow down." And red means "Where the **** did you get that banana?"

The doode is just straight-on kick-ass! Like Will.i.am is doing for science, technology and (more specifically) robotics (teamed-up with Dean Kamen), this guy make science cool. And that's key to getting some of our brightest minds into those areas..

They shouldn't be called Optical illusions......they should be called brain failures.

The solar system has a new most distant member, bringing its outer frontier into focus.

New work from Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and Chadwick Trujillo from the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, reports the discovery of a distant dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, which was found beyond the known edge of the solar system. This is likely one of thousands of distant objects that are thought to form the so-called inner Oort Cloud. What’s more, their work indicates the potential presence of an enormous planet, perhaps up to 10 times the size of Earth, not yet seen, but possibly influencing the orbit of 2012 VP113 as well as other inner Oort Cloud objects.

The known solar system can be divided into three parts: the rocky planets like Earth, which are close to the Sun; the gas giant planets, which are further out; and the frozen objects of the Kuiper Belt, which lie just beyond Neptune’s orbit. Beyond this, there appears to be an edge to the solar system where only one object, Sedna, was previously known to exist for its entire orbit. But the newly found 2012 VP113 has an orbit that stays even beyond Sedna, making it the furthest known in the solar system.

More at the link

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Originally Posted by Mecca

Well there is no way they're taking a QB 1st, I'd be bet my left testicle on that.

High Tech is Sorcery and the people who are really powerful are literally telling people to commit crimes using the psychic interspace created by the WWW and Wireless. They are controlling peoples actions like drones . The two things are deeply intertwined. The more man's brain interfaces with machines the creepier it gets. They use brains separate from a human body in a supercomputer and you have The Image of the Beast. The military has been doing this since the 50s

This episode of the ESOcast presents the recent discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings.

Telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile were used to make this surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.

This unique finding has sparked much interest and debate since it is the smallest object by far to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature.

Astronomers think that this sort of ring is likely to be formed from debris left over after a collision. The story of this unique and unexpected discovery is told in ESOcast 64: First Ring System Around an Asteroid.

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Originally Posted by Chris616

High Tech is Sorcery and the people who are really powerful are literally telling people to commit crimes using the psychic interspace created by the WWW and Wireless. They are controlling peoples actions like drones . The two things are deeply intertwined. The more man's brain interfaces with machines the creepier it gets. They use brains separate from a human body in a supercomputer and you have The Image of the Beast. The military has been doing this since the 50s

High Tech is Sorcery and the people who are really powerful are literally telling people to commit crimes using the psychic interspace created by the WWW and Wireless. They are controlling peoples actions like drones . The two things are deeply intertwined. The more man's brain interfaces with machines the creepier it gets. They use brains separate from a human body in a supercomputer and you have The Image of the Beast. The military has been doing this since the 50s

Gas from another galaxy is hitting our own, triggering the birth of bright new stars and adding fresh luster to the Milky Way.

For the first time astronomers have detected stars in an enormous stream of gas shed by the Magellanic Clouds, the two brightest galaxies that orbit our own.

Sought for decades, the newfound stars are young, which means they formed recently, while the Magellanic gas collided with gas in the Milky Way. The newborn stars offer insight into processes that occurred in the ancient universe, when small, gas-rich galaxies smashed together to give rise to giants like the Milky Way. "This is the one and only galaxy interaction we can model in very much detail," says Dana Casetti-Dinescu, an astronomer at Southern Connecticut State University, who notes that other collisions of gas clouds between galaxies are farther away and thus harder to observe. "For more distant systems that interact, we don't have the wealth of information."

Some two dozen galaxies revolve around our own but only the Magellanic Clouds shine so brightly that stargazers can see the pair with the naked eye. What really sets these two apart is their vigor: Unlike all other Milky Way satellites, the Magellanic Clouds abound with gas, the raw material galaxies use to create new stars.

The Magellanic Clouds are certainly nearby: The Large Magellanic Cloud is just 160,000 light-years from Earth, whereas the Small Magellanic Cloud is 200,000 light-years distant and 75,000 light-years away from its partner. As the two galaxies orbit the Milky Way, they probably orbit each another, too.

A closer look at the Magellanic Clouds reveals more details. In the early 1970s radio astronomers discovered a long stream of gas that trails behind the two galaxies in their orbit around us. This gas, named the Magellanic Stream, consists mostly of neutral hydrogen atoms, which broadcast radio waves that are 21 centimeters long. A shorter gaseous component leads the Magellanic Clouds and is therefore called the Leading Arm. From the tip of the Leading aArm to the far end of the Magellanic Stream, this gaseous strand is at least 200 degrees long and stretches across more than half a million light-years of space.

Just as the moon lifts the terrestrial seas, the Large Magellanic Cloud's gravitational pull has torn most of this gas out of the Small Magelleanic Cloud, whose grasp on its contents is less secure. Stars should also have spilled out of the Magellanic Clouds. Although both stars and gas exist between the Magellanic Clouds, no one has ever found any stars in either the Magellanic Stream or the Leading Arm.

Until now. Casetti-Dinescu and her colleagues used the 6.5-meter Walter Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to uncover six luminous blue stars in the Leading Arm. "They are formed in situ," she says. "They have to be, because they're too young—they don't have enough time to travel from the Clouds to their current location in their lifetime." Five of the six stars are about 60,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center, near the periphery of our galaxy's disk of stars.

Like most spiral galaxies, the Milky Way maintains a vast reservoir of hydrogen gas that encircles its stellar disk. So the newborn stars could have originated in our galaxy. But the stars share the velocity of gas in the Leading Arm, suggesting they arose as its gas crashed into the Milky Way's outer gas disk, compressing the Arm gas until it spawned stars. The astronomers report their discovery in the April 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This is the first credible evidence of stars associated with the Leading Arm," says David Nidever of the University of Michigan, who is conducting his own search. He's especially intrigued by a sixth and more distant star the astronomers have spotted. Located 130,000 light-years from the galactic center—about twice as far as the other stars—it shines well beyond the edge of the Milky Way's stellar disk, in the vast outer halo beyond. The star has a spectral type of O6, corresponding to a surface temperature of 44,000 kelvins. Such a hot star burns brightly but briefly; it formed a mere one million to two million years ago. "It seems like that star really has to have been born in the halo," Nidever says.

The Milky Way's outer halo, although mostly starless, possesses hot diffuse gas that greets infalling gas in the Leading Arm. "This material is plunging through the hot halo of the Milky Way," Casetti-Dinescu says. Magellanic gas hit the hot halo gas, she thinks, getting squeezed and forging the short-lived star.

Although the stars owe their births to gas from the Magellanic Clouds, they now revolve around a new master: the Milky Way Galaxy, which has enhanced its already significant grandeur by grabbing gas from its two most flamboyant satellites and sculpting it into new stars, a process our galaxy must have exploited numerous times in ancient epochs as it grew into a giant.

The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.

The electromagnetic spectrum extends from below the low frequencies used for modern radio communication to gamma radiation at the short-wavelength (high-frequency) end, thereby covering wavelengths from thousands of kilometers down to a fraction of the size of an atom. The limit for long wavelengths is the size of the universe itself, while it is thought that the short wavelength limit is in the vicinity of the Planck length, although in principle the spectrum is infinite and continuous.

Light waves across the electromagnetic spectrum behave in similar ways. When a light wave encounters an object, they are either transmitted, reflected, absorbed, refracted, polarized, diffracted, or scattered depending on the composition of the object and the wavelength of the light.

Specialized instruments onboard NASA spacecraft and airplanes collect data on how electromagnetic waves behave when they interact with matter. These data can reveal the physical and chemical composition of matter.

Seen here is a sample of telescopes (operating as of February 2013) operating at wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. Several of these observatories observe more than one band of the EM spectrum, and those are placed within the band of their primary instrument(s).

The represented observatories are: HESS, Fermi and Swift for gamma-ray, NuSTAR and Chandra for X-ray, GALEX for ultraviolet, Kepler, Hubble, Keck (I and II), SALT, and Gemini (South) for visible, Spitzer, Herschel, and Sofia for infrared, Planck and CARMA for microwave, Spektr-R, Greenbank, and VLA for radio.